The health risk factor of obesity or overweight may be reducible through behavior therapy based treatments. The proposed research wil examine the ability of four-month treatments using several behavioral techniques to achieve clinically significant losses with individuals of genuine clinical concern solicited from the community and at least 15 percent overweight. A behavior therapy, self-control procedure for weight loss for which evidence of appreciable efficacy exists will be analyzed through comparing the efficacy of its several components alone and in combination. Its relative efficacy will be further evaluated through comparing its component for providing incentives for weight loss and its component for teaching skills in the control of eating with analogous components reported in the literature. From these studies, a comprehensive treatment package will be developed and demonstrated in a study also evaluating the efficacy of several procedures for encouraging weight loss maintenance. Previous results of the self-control package indicate that part of its efficacy may lie in its not being an overly constraining or directive treatment. To test this, a highly directive version of the basic package will be compared with a minimally directive version. In this study, particular attention will be paid to relative efficacy in maintenance of losses and interactions with several individual personality characteristics which may be related to maintenance of losses and/or differences among individuals in their responses to highly or minimally directive behavior therapy procedures.